Re: Hefferon Michael
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In reply to:
Hefferon Michael
michael hefferon 11/12/99
I have done extensive research on the Hefferons/Heverans and all other spelling variations in the Belmullet area, northwest Mayo. I have posted hundreds of documents scanned from microfilms of baptisms, births, deaths, church and civil marriages, and multiple revisions of Griffiths Valuations on my Ancestry.com tree. There are many branches there, which I connect as I find evidence of relationships.
About the original post here, I see that it was written in 1999, so I'm sure a lot has been learned since then. So that people who are just reading it now don't get off track by a comment there, I'd like to explain about name spellings. If you study the documents for any family, you find that spelling was NEVER consistent for our family name. At least into the early 1900s, few people knew how to write, including their names. The spelling depended on how the registrar wrote it. For each event and each person, the spelling could be different. I've seen instances when a registrar wrote it on a single day for the same infant one way for the birth and another for the death, and on the same entry two different ways in two different places (for example, father and informant).
The same people have been recorded as Heveran, Heverin, Hevron, Heffron, Hefron, Hefferon, Hefferin, Hifferin, Heffernan, Havern, and more. If you get attached to one spelling, you'll miss your records. Searching with wildcards helps. For example on Ancestry.com, to search for evidence, you can search for "H*f*r*n H*v*r*n" to come up with the variations. (A few documents that have been transcribed incorrectly, so will still be missed.) When I'm searching for names within someone's family tree, I generally just enter the first couple of letters of our last name to find all of them (for example, David He-)
Good luck!